A school shooting in California

Mindful of the crazy revisions and retractions that dogged the initial reports from Newtown, let us assume all information is preliminary at this point, but the Silicon Valley Mercury News reports a school sheeting at the Taft High School in California:

One student has been shot at a high school in Taft, Calif., a community in the southern San Joaquin Valley.

Kern County sheriff’s spokesman Ray Pruitt also says a suspect is in custody and is believed to be a student.

The shooting was reported at Taft Union High School around 9 a.m. Thursday.

The sheriff’s spokesman says the wounded student was flown to a hospital in Bakersfield.

Pruitt says it is believed a shotgun was used in the attack.

Taft is a community of about 7,000 some 120 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

To get the most obvious background points out of the way, California has among the strictest gun control laws in the nation, if not the strictest, and absolutely none of the current gun-control mania has included any discussion of shotguns. They’re not “assault weapons,” beyond the truism that every weapon is an assault weapon.

I have seen some other reports indicating that a teacher was also injured. The gun is said to have been loaded with birdshot. The school reportedly has a police officer on site, but whether or not the officer played any role in the incident is unclear.